Andrew Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, was wrapping up a speech at a northern English high school recently when one girl raised her hand. “I’ve got two questions for you,” the student said, according to Mr. Haldane: “Who are you, and why are you here?”
Long shrouded in mystery, the world’s major central banks have in recent years been shedding more light on their inner workings. Now, they have a new mission, which is to engage and educate the general public. Top officials are venturing out to open-air markets, holding open-day festivals and quick-fire question-and-answer sessions on social media, and producing games, cartoons and videos. Some forays go better than others.
Norway’s central bank scored an unlikely viral hit last year with a comedy rap music video to promote a series of cod-themed banknotes, featuring “DJ Codfather” and a cameo by the bank’s governor, Oystein Olsen. “The cod is coming now,” Mr. Olsen says, peering through binoculars from his office window.
Russia’s central-bank governor Elvira Nabiullina went one step further in December, breaking into song in a slick music video that also featured a dabbing babushka.
New Zealand’s new central-bank governor, Adrian Orr, spoke in sign language and Maori--the language of the indigenous Polynesian people-- at his inaugural news conference in May. New Zealand has around 150,000 Maori speakers, and around 9,000 deaf people, out of a population of around 5 million. The central bank also published an illustrated “Monetary policy statement in pictures,” whose simple images include a hot-air balloon tagged “inflation” held down by a crate of “imports.”
“I love the pictures,” Mr. Orr told reporters, though he conceded he hopes to upgrade their quality. “These are all we could get immediately off one of our kid’s icons actually,” he said.
Central banks distribute banknotes, regulate the value of the national currency and often act as a lender of last resort to banks. By adjusting short-term borrowing costs, central bankers can boost growth and employment or control inflation.
Until recently they preferred to obscure their intentions; secrecy helped to avoid interference from politicians, whose short-term horizons might cause them to pressure central banks to support economic growth at the expense of higher inflation, which can hurt the economy over time.
Central bankers once mocked openness and clarity. “Never explain, never apologize,” was the mantra of Montagu Norman, who ran the Bank of England during the 1920s and ‘30s and often adopted a false identity when traveling. In 1982, when Denmark’s central bank changed a decades-old strategy for managing the exchange rate, it didn’t publish a press release or mention the decision in its annual report.
Until 1994 the U.S. Federal Reserve did not tell the public when it changed policy. Experts had to infer its actions from market movements.
That has changed as central banks won independence to set policy free from government interference and, more recently, launched large and complex stimulus policies, such as printing large amounts of money to buy government debt. Central bankers worry they could lose those new powers without public support.
Today’s central bank governors mingle breezily with common folk. Bank of Israel governor Karnit Flug shopped for vegetables in a local market in November to promote new Shekel bills, explaining the note’s features to a stall owner.
Germany’s Bundesbank put on bouncy castles, balloon artists, food carts and a band to lure locals last summer to its Frankfurt headquarters, a slab of raw, gray concrete in the Brutalist style.
A slinky gold character dressed as a Euro coin leaped around and posed for photos. Jens Weidmann, the Bundesbank’s president, raced slot cars.
The switch toward unscripted events isn’t always seamless. The language used by central bankers is often incomprehensible, and jokes can fall flat. That’s a problem when trillions of dollars of investments are at stake.
When Australia’s former central-bank governor, Glenn Stevens, said at a business luncheon in 2013 that officials had “deliberated for a very long time” before leaving policy rates unchanged, investors took it as a signal to sell the Australian dollar, pushing the currency to a 34-month low against the U.S. dollar. The bank later clarified that the comment was supposed to be funny.
Bank of England Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent apologized on May 16 for describing the U.K. economy as “menopausal” in a newspaper interview, after public criticism of the remark.
Mr. Broadbent said, in a subsequent statement, that he had been trying to explain the word “climacteric,” used by economic historians to describe a period of low productivity growth during the 19th century.
Neel Kashkari, an avid Twitter user and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote on the medium in early March that the U.S. economy had previously been “at maximum employment. We are now at maximumer employment."
“So explain why monetary policy is still in emergency mode,” one investor responded.
“I was kidding,” Mr. Kashkari wrote.
“What central bankers want is not so much to be understood as to be liked,” said Yoram Bauman, a Seattle-based academic who calls himself “the world’s first and only stand-up economist.”
Surveys suggest central bankers still have their work cut out in the popularity stakes.
Trust in the four major central banks –the Fed, the ECB, Bank of England and Bank of Japan—has stagnated or fallen since the financial crisis, from an already low level, according to 2016 surveys by Eurobarometer, Gallup and the central banks themselves. A YouGov survey in the U.K. last year found that economists were less trusted than any profession except politicians.
A survey this year by New Zealand’s central bank found the vast majority of the public had no idea what the central bank was.
“That’s a good thing on Saturday at the football ground but not necessarily a good thing if we’re trying to raise financial literacy,” said Mr. Orr, the central bank governor for New Zealand.
Some central bankers are toning down their expectations of relating to ordinary people.
The Bank of England’s Mr. Haldane admits the schoolgirl who challenged him had a point.
“That was a pretty good question actually. Why am I here?,” he says. “Trying to hold the attention of fifty 13-year-olds for an hour, that’s a tough gig, right? They don’t care.”
Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com